NVIDIA T500 Laptop GPU vs Intel UHD Graphics 64EUs (Alder Lake 12th Gen) vs Intel Iris Xe Graphics G7 96EUs

The Nvidia T500 Mobile (formerly known as Quadro T500) for laptops is a professional mobile graphics card that is based on the Turing architecture (TU117 chip). It is based on the consumer GeForce MX450 and features the same 896 cores and a 64 Bit memory bus. Currently it is available with 2 or 4 GB graphics RAM (GDDR5 or GDDR6). The TDP ranges between 18 - 25 Watt depending on the variant. As the MX450, the T500 also supports PCIe 4.0. The chip is manufactured in 12nm FinFET at TSMC. 

The Turing generation did not only introduce raytracing for the RTX cards, but also optimized the architecture of the cores and caches. According to Nvidia the CUDA cores offer now a concurrent execution of floating point and integer operations for increased performance in compute-heavy workloads of modern games. Furthermore, the caches were reworked (new unified memory architecture with twice the cache compared to Pascal). This leads to up to 50% more instructions per clock and a 40% more power efficient usage compared to Pascal. In contrary to the faster Quadro RTX cards, the T500 does not feature raytracing and Tensor cores.

The Intel UHD Graphics 80EUs (12th Gen Alder Lake GPU, Xe Architecture with 80 EUs) is an integrated graphics card in the mid range Alder-Lake CPUs. It is using the new Xe architecture (Gen12) and was introduced with the Alder Lake-H series. In theoretical benchmarks the GPU is on par with the Radeon RX Vega 8 (iGPU of Ryzen 4000 CPUs) but in games the performance is a bit worse due to less optimized drivers (in 2022). E.g. in our tests only low demanding games like GRID Legends were playable in low settings.

The SoC is manufactured in an improved 10nm process (called Intel 7).

The Intel Xe Graphics G7 (Tiger-Lake U GPU with 96 EUs) is a integrated graphics card in the high end Tiger-Lake U CPUs (15 - 28 Watt). It is using the new Xe architecture (Gen12) and was introduced in September 2020. The GPU clocks with a base clock speed (guaranteed) of 400 MHz in all CPUs and can boost up to 1340 MHz (i7-1185G7). The slowest variant offers only 1100 MHz boost (i5-1130G7, 12 Watt TDP).

The performance depends on the TDP settings of the laptop and the used cooling. First informations show that the chip can be configured at 12 and 28 Watt TDP default (as the Ice Lake-U chips) and the performance should be around a dedicated GeForce MX350 in 3DMark benchmarks. For gaming we are expecting a bit worse performance due to the missing dedicated graphics memory and driver support. Many games e.g. had problems when testing the various laptops (e.g. Horizon Zero Dawn or Cyberpunk 2077 did not start or were crashing - see list below). Less demanding games like the Mass Effect Legendary Edition ran in medium settings fine. Compared to the older Ice Lake Iris Plus G7 GPU, the new Tiger Lake GPU should be approximately twice as fast. Therefore, the iGPU is still only for lowest graphical settings and low resolutions in demanding games.

The Tiger Lake SoCs and therefore the integrated GPU are manufactured in the modern 10nm+ (10nm SuperFin) process (improved 10nm process) at Intel and therefore should offer a very good efficiency.